"Fred Hoyle & John Elliot - A For Andromeda" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoyle Fred)

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 "Jacko's spheres!" The Professor twinkled. "Or Jacko's folly, they call it. It's a display of things in orbit near the earth. All
these white units represent satellites, ballistic missiles and so on. Ironmongery. That's the earth, in the middle."
The Professor waved it daintily aside.
"A gimmick, I think you'd call it. Jacko thought it would interest our government visitors. We have to keep tabs, of course,
on what's happening near the earth, but it's a waste of a machine like this. Still, the military ask us to, and we don't get the sort of
money we need unless we can tap the defence budget." He sounded as though he was being naughty and enjoyed it. He made one
of his small, manicured gestures to take in the room and the huge thing outside. "Twenty-five millions or more, this has cost."
"So there's a military interest?"
"Yes. But it's my establishment-or rather, the Ministry of Science's. Not your Ministry's."
"I'm on your staff now."
"Not at my request." His manner stiffened, as it had not done when Fleming was rude to him; Fleming, after all, was one of
his own.
"Does anyone else know why I'm here?" Judy asked him.
"I've told no-one."
He steered her away from the subject and into the other room, where he went carefully over the receiving apparatus and the
communications equipment.
"We're simply a link in a chain of observatories all round the world, though not the weakest link." He looked around with a
kind of pure pleasure at the switchboards and wires and racks of equipment. "I didn't feel an old man when we started to put all
this together, but I do now. You have an idea and you think: 'That's what we must do', and it just seems the next step. Quite a
small step, possibly. Then you start: design, research, committees, building, politics. An hour of your life here, a month there.
Let's hope it'll work. Ah, here's Whelan! He understands all about this part of it."
Judy was introduced to a pasty-faced young man with an Australian voice who held on to her hand as though it was
something he had lost.
"Haven't we met before somewhere?"
"I don't think so." She stared at him candidly with large blue eyes, but he would not be put off.
"I'm sure of it."
She wavered and looked around for help. Harries, the cleaner, was standing across the room, and when she looked at him he
shook his head very slightly. She turned back to Whelan.
"I'm afraid I don't remember."
"Maybe at Woomera..."
The Professor piloted her back into the main control room.
"What was his name?"
"Whelan."
She made a note on her pad. The party at the control desk had split up, leaving only one young man who was sitting in the
duty engineer's seat checking the panels. The Professor led her across to him.
"Hallo, Harvey."
The young man looked up and half rose from his seat.
"Good-evening, Professor Reinhart." At least he was polite. Judy looked out of the window to the great piece of gadgetry
beyond and the empty moorland and the sky, now growing dark purple.
"You know the principle of the thing?" Harvey asked her. "Any radio emission from the sky strikes the bowl and is reflected
to the aerial, and received and recorded on the equipment in there." He pointed through the glass partition. Judy did not look for
fear of seeing Whelan, but Harvey-keen, dogged and toneless-was soon directing her attention to something else. "This bank of
computers works out the azimuth and elevation of whatever source you want to focus on to it and keeps it following. There's a
servo link arrangement..."
Eventually Judy managed to escape to the hall and have a moment alone with Harries.

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 "Get Whelan moved," she said.
She had left her suitcase at the hotel in the town and driven on up the hill with very little idea of what to expect. She had